


A Job For Harry

by candelabrum



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, Gen, Magic, Witch Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 14:43:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12256443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candelabrum/pseuds/candelabrum
Summary: Harry’s house is overflowing with cats and he’s run all out of cat food, and human food that could be eaten by cats. There is only one solution: Harry Styles needs a job.





	A Job For Harry

**Author's Note:**

> It is October aka Halloween month. This is a crack-y, little, unbetaed fic about witch Harry based on one of my fav childrens books A Job for Wittilda.

In an old house, in a rather small town just north of another small town Harry sighs. He taps his pen against the layers of thin newsprint. Usually he just does the crosswords. Or tries his hand at a papier-mâché project from time to time. Not today though. Today he is looking through the vacancies.

A soft tail brushes his left calf. He reaches a hand down to pet soft warm fur. Dusty purrs. It reminds him who he is doing this for. For Dusty and Wilma and Otto and Sylvia and Carl and Dory and Vincent. Harry couldn’t say no when it came to cats. Or frogs. And over the years his household had grown bigger and bigger with new pets. So had the vet bills.

Dusty jumps onto a chair, and onto the table. She walks straight to the newspaper and lies down on top of it.

He usually manages fine. His herbs and teas and oils and potted plants, both magical and not, usually make him enough money. Sometimes when expensive things arise he spends less money on food for himself and eats more of the things he grows in his own garden for a while, but right now, on the brink of December, and after this years Halloween accident, things are not looking so great.

 

**Two Weeks Ago**

“They’re quite-” Liam notices, guilt creeping on his face.

Expensive, yeah. The brooms span the whole wall of the shop hanging in two rows. Everything from rowan to cherry tree wood, all in slightly different shapes.

“Are you sure?” Liam asks “That you can’t fix yours.”

“You can’t just fix a broom. You can’t tape it back together with a bit of industrial tape, and all’s fine. At least not if you’re intending to fly with it.” Harry takes a few slow steps along the wall, past maple wood broomsticks towards the darker woods like mahogany, and Harry thinks he spots an ebony broom a little further along in the upper row. His last broom, the one that is now broken, had been a rather dark oak. “It’s a delicate matter, Liam. Brooms have personalities, they’re not like cars.”

Liam sighs, trotting along with Harry, following him around keeping a careful distance to the display. He looks scared to accidentally touch anything and just generally intimidated by the whole atmosphere of the shop, but he had insisted on coming along.

It had happened on Halloween. Liam had thought it a good idea to borrow Harry’s broomstick. Equipped with a plastic witch's hat, plenty of face paint, and enough vodka and sugar in his bloodstream that he was convinced he could totally fly it down the balcony; it was magic after all. Harry had been a bit too drunk and a bit too distracted making a jack-o-lantern tell jokes to stop him.

That’s how Liam ended up in a magic shop for the first time in his life.

 

He has a new broom now. They’re still getting to know each other. Harry is still a bit sad about his old one, but it’s ok. He’d refused to let Liam pay for all of it. Neither of them could afford that, so they’d shared, Harry’s mum had lent him some money, and Liam had promised to pay them back when he could.

Now Harry is broke, and neither is he qualified to be a joiner, nor does he have experience in, or is ever planning on, exterminating animals. Maybe he should just switch to online job-hunting. Everyone knows that newspapers are old fashioned and outdated, but so is Harry. Not outdated, but old fashioned and terrible at technology. Harry sighs again.

“I know you’re hungry,” he breathes, scratching behind Dusty’s ear. He tries to read though the vacancies around where Dusty is lying. This really has to work. It is his last chance.

The hair salon hadn’t worked out. Harry had managed to convince his friend Lou to hire him in her hair salon and he had tried, he really had. Things had gone wrong on his first day, when he had been told to comb a customer’s hair. Her hair had been so long and straight and thin, Harry couldn’t help getting inspired. It had started with a simple knot and from there on he had just kept knotting. One knot after the other, until a magnificent spiderweb had formed on Ms. Gordon’s head. Harry could never ever do anything like that with the mop of curls on his head.

Mrs. Gordon hadn’t liked it though. She had shrieked before Harry had even had the chance to placed a little money spider in her hair and finish off his work. Lou hadn’t seemed happy either and he had gotten fired. He should probably apologise again.

 

HAVE YOU GOT THE SPEED? THEN YOU’RE WHO WE NEED!  
Deliverer wanted for evening shift. Own means of transportation needed.  
Wednesday, 8:00 pm for test delivery!

This, this he can do! He uncaps his pen and draws a fat green circle around the small ad at the very bottom of the page, because yes, Harry Styles has got the speed and the brand new broom to fly with and maybe a job come Wednesday. Harry almost jumps out of his seat in joy, and then he does, lifting Dusty up from the ground and swirling her around in the air.

“Dusty, Wilma, Otto, Sylvia, Carl, Dory, Vincent. Dusty, I’m going to be a deliverer!” he waltzes around the kitchen with Dusty in his arms. “I’m going to deliver pizzas!”

***

Wednesday is a long day. Harry stands up at half six after a night of not being able to sleep much out of a mix of excitement and nerves. He spends it drinking tea, petting his cats, and bonding with his broom in preparation for the trial work. Come evening he puts on his purple winter cloak, and kisses every single cat goodbye trying not to wake the ones that are asleep.

“Look after the house for me while I’m gone,” he tells Dusty before kissing her little pink nose.

Harry quietly closes the front door. He steps out onto the muddy grass in front of his house, gets on his broom, stomps his boots on the ground, and ascends into the air. He flies up and over, past the slightly askew roof of his small house and the tall pine trees surrounding and towering above it like one large shadow in the night. In the time he has been living there it has become as much part of himself as the rings on his fingers, the tattoos on his skin or every hungry animal inside. He heads to the pizzeria.

It’s in a residential neighborhood, in a slightly bigger town not far away from home. The shop window is brightly lit, with a pink neon sign reading pizza flickering in one corner. It is easy to find. There are already a few people there when Harry lands on the boardwalk. A bell ring when he opens the door and makes everyone look at him as he steps inside the little front room. It’s warm inside, and there are a lot of people there already.

Harry nods and smiles at his competition.

“Hi,” he says, “Good evening.”

And then they wait. Harry shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again, playing with the rings on his fingers and tapping those fingers on his broom. The clock on the wall ticks. Dust settles, but Harry’s nerves don’t.

“Heeeeello!”

Someone bursts in from the back almost running into the counter. Almost. All you can see is one of those muffin-shaped cook hats peeking out from behind a giant stack of cardboard pizza boxes. Heads look up, postures straighten, everyone turns towards the stack of boxes, and there is motion in the room.

The man carrying the stack of pizza boxes puts them down on a chair. They still reach up to the man’s chest. He leaves and comes back with even more boxes and puts them down on the only other chair. Finally, folding his hands in front of his chest, he speaks:

“Welcome, and good evening everybody,” He seems really nice, Harry thinks. He could see himself working for him. “Thank you for showing up today. I’m Niall. Now, every single one of you,” Niall takes the time to actually look at every single one of them, and points at another person with every single word. “is going to deliver some of these pizza to people in Villerfield and the surroundings. It’s seven orders each. The addresses are on the boxes.”

He takes a few boxes from the top of one stack and hands them the to the first applicant. “Careful,” he whispered making intense eye contact before handing out the next batch.

Harry is one of the last to get his pizzas. The cartons are warm in his hands, when Niall hands them over, giving the stack an affectionate pat before turning around again. There were handwritten notes with an address stapled to the boxes.

“Now.” Nill announces, holding his left arm up solemnly. Thankfully, he is not one for long dramatic pauses. “You should all be back before eleven, but the first one to have delivered his or her or their seven orders gets the job.”

Like that, everyone rushes out the small door. So does Harry. He grabs his broom in one hand, balancing his pizza boxes in the other. “Careful,” he whispers to himself as he steps out into the cold evening, if you can still call it an evening this time of year, when the sun sets at five and the sky is pitch black except for the stars and the moon by this time.

***

The first address is pretty easy to find and not far from the bakery at all. Harry lands in front of a little black fence gate. He rings the doorbell and soon after a woman comes out. She tells him he’s early and disappears back inside to get her wallet. When she comes back she pays him, thanks him, smiles, and closes the door.

Harry bites his lip. He just successfully delivered his first pizza. And it went really well. He swings one leg over his broomstick enthusiastically and stomps on the ground mid-twirl, ascending into the night sky. A few stray locks that had fallen out of his bun are flying in the airstream.

He flies from house to house and stops on chimneys to read the next address, his cloak flying and an excited smile on his face. One man pays solely in change and takes forever to count it, but the girl who had been next doesn’t complain. She even gives Harry a generous tip and lets him pet her pet turtles. He is still on time and he feels bigger than the universe and larger than life.

Harry is down to his last delivery. The address sounds familiar, like most street names in this area do. He has been living here his whole life.

As he is flying over the municipal park of Villerfield he hears something. He stops in midair, and there it is again, a faint _meow_ coming from below him. Any other time Harry would be down there in a heartbeat, looking through all the trees and bushes to find the distressed cat at the source of it, but tonight, tonight he is on a mission, a time sensitive, important mission. There it is again, the meaaow. He isn’t late yet.

Harry floats down a bit listening for more meows, and follows them to a large tree at the centre of the park. There, high up on a shaky branch is a little white cat. The poor thing is stuck and can't get back down herself.

“Oh dear,” Harry says to the cat, and admittedly, partly to himself.

He is about to fly up there and save the cat when out of the corner of his eye he sees a red scooter flashing past. He’s seen it before, in front of the pizzeria earlier, which means that it is one of his competitors delivering pizzas. Oh dear.

“Meaow,” says the cat.

“If I don’t deliver my last box and get back to the pizzeria in time I’ll be late, and I won’t get the job, which means we won’t have any money to buy food. I really need this job,” says Harry.

“Meaoooooooow!” says the cat.

He thinks about Dusty and Wilma and Otto and Sylvia and Carl and Dory and Vincent waiting for him to come home with something to eat. He can’t let them down again. Maybe he can come back after he delivered his last box and got the job.

“MEAOOO-”

“Okay.”

When it comes down to it Harry’s heart has always been bigger than his brain, or at least louder. Maybe he can still make it in time. He grips his last pizza box tight, and his broomstick tighter, and flies up the old oak tree through branches and the very last remaining dried up leaves, as high as he can, which is not very high. The branches are getting too dense for him fly up any further.

“Don’t move,” Harry tells the cat stepping onto a relatively sturdy looking branch and grabbing the trunk with both his arms. Now that he isn’t on his broom anymore it does look quite high, but this is not the time to give tree hugging a try. There is a distressed cat to be saved and maybe still a job to be gotten if he is lucky.

He grabs onto two branches with his hands and starts working his way up. The branches only grow denser, and thinner the higher he gets, scratching his face and tugging at his clothes. When the branches start bending under Harry’s weight he reaches out his left arm towards the cat as far as he can and he almost, he is almost there, just a little. He can’t reacher her.

“Mieaow.” The cat stares at him.

He carefully stands up on tiptoes, and reaches as far as he can, but to no avail. The cat remains just out of his reach.

“You know what I said about not moving?” Harry says. He is starting to shake and wobble on his tiptoes. “Screw that. Move just a tiny bit towards me, yeah?”

The cat looks apprehensive and Harry tris his best to look trustworthy. He grabs the branch in his right hand even tighter and wiggles with the fingers on his left hand.

Just as the cat tentatively moves one paw towards Harry an icy gust of wind shakes the tree and they both fall to the ground. Harry lands bum first on the leaf covered ground, shortly followed by the cat landing elegantly on all fours and the two pizza boxes landing next to them with a muffled thud. Stray leaves are tumbling down around them.

Alright then, Harry thinks. He takes the little cat under his arm and gathers up his broom and the pizza boxes. They are both save, and maybe there is still a small, dismal chance. Maybe Harry still has a microscopic shot at getting the job if they do the worlds fastest delivery. And even if there isn’t, there is someone out there waiting for two pizzas.

He tries to shakes some of the crumpled leaves and dirt off his shoulder and gets on his broom. He stomps on the ground urgently, and they are on their way. Off into the night. He flies as fast as he can, the wind doing what he hadn’t managed to do and blowing the lasts fallen leaves out of his hair and from his cloak. Harry can already see the street they have to go. He can also see the pizzeria, a distant, brightly lit blotch from up here. He hopes that none of his competitors have successfully returned yet.

The last house. The last steps, leading up to the last door were of dark stone. Maybe the stone only looked dark at night. There is no way to tell, because there is no motion-activated lamp like there is at many front doors outside this house, but Harry didn’t really care about that right now. He doesn’t care at all for any of the unimportant details. He presses the doorbell, just keeps the button pushed down for a good four seconds at least, just to make sure it is heard.

He does feel a bit bad about it as he jumps from one foot to the other, waiting for the door to open, afterwards. He is just considering ringing the doorbell again, when the door opens.

A sleepy looking young man is holding the door half-open. His hair is a mess.

“Hi,” Harry smiles at him. He doesn’t want to waste any time and holds out the two pizza boxes. They are admittedly slightly battered, and a bit muddy by now. He smiles a bit wider to make up for it.

The man takes the boxes, and maybe Harry is just imagining his look at the dented corners and mud stains. Harry rattles off the price, takes the men’s money, thanks him for the tip, wishes him a nice evening. He is back in the air before he is even completely turned around on the doorstep.

***

The landing isn’t very smooth.

“Meeeeow.” the little cat complains. She needs a name. Later.

Harry bursts into the pizzeria, door flying open wide and bouncing back from the wall with a thud. There is no one inside which means he is either the last one to return and everyone has gotten here before him, or he is the first one. He tries not to get too hopeful. Or maybe he finished third, or second, and there is just no one here besides him right now. This really could mean anything.

He waits a moment for something to happen.

“I’m back,” he announces taking a few steps towards the counter. He is vibrating with anxiety, but he tries to keep himself composed. His stomach feels like he is free falling, like they used to when he was a kid and had just learned how to fly on a broom, letting themselves fall and stopping as close to hitting the ground as possible, or like a roller coaster he supposes. He’d never liked those.

Niall appears from the back room once again, a rag in one hand and an astonished look on his face. He glances at his wristwatch, and back up at Harry, back at his wristwatch, Harry, the clock on the wall, his wristwatch and back at Harry again. His mouth had been slowly dropping open. It doesn’t close again for another few seconds before he finally speaks:

“It’s been 23 minutes,” a pause. “How?”

“23 minutes?”

“Well…I mean I didn’t use a stopwatch or anything, but yeah. About 23 minutes.” Niall comes out from behind the counter and halts right in front of Harry. He notices the kitten to his feet, pauses, and shakes his head. “Harry, right?”

Harry nods and hums something vaguely affirmative.

Niall nods and smiles. “Harry,” he says. “You are hired. You’ve got the job!”

“I’ve got the job?”

“Yes!”

“I’ve got the job!”

They both begin to laugh and the little cat joins in. Harry picks her up. He will have to teach her how to waltz. This is an occasion for a waltz, but also an occasion for hugs. Overcome by thankfulness and joy and so much relief he puts the cat back down again and lunges forward grabbing Niall, and hugging him tightly.

“Thank you.”

***

This night Harry comes home with a new member to their family on one arm, a box of celebratory pizza under the other, and most importantly, with a new job.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.
> 
> I wish I could mention and thank all the people I have talked to about witch Harry over the years, but it has been literal years since I wrote the first draft of this and my memory is shit. I am sorry.
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://abracandelabrum.tumblr.com/)


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